


Four to Go

by footlooseandfancybe



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, aw, dopes and their feelings, sam's trying really hard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-07-29 19:18:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7696168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/footlooseandfancybe/pseuds/footlooseandfancybe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam hopes this is a new beginning. Castiel <em>knows</em> it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Ssschhlupp_

A sound very much like a lollipop being dragged out of a mouth (or a plunger being pulled from a toilet) startled Sam into looking up from the shotgun he was cleaning. Then he caught a faint whiff, the scent of cold air and anise, sharp and insistent. He rolled his eyes. Gabriel. Sam smirked a little, thinking there wasn't a huge difference between a toilet and the archangel.

Ever since the Purgatory/Soul debacle, Gabriel had taken to showing up once or twice a week. Sometimes for a hunt, sometimes to steal Dean’s food, occasionally to speak in low and worried tones to Castiel. But mostly, it was to harass Sam. Every time the angel brought with him a sucker or lollipop, delighting in telling Sam all about the history of candy.

"Rudeness does not suit you, Sam. And before you whine about 'no mind reading!', I have an angelic Google-alert for when someone is insulting me," Gabriel said tartly. Sam rolled his eyes and resolved to take the high road in the conversation.

“What’s today’s flavor?” he asked innocently, ignoring the archangel’s smugness.

“How on earth _did_ you know it was me, Sam?” the angel swaggered over to one of the beds and took a seat. Sam resumed cleaning the gun.

“Guess I’m just getting toooooo predictable. But if you must know, apple mint, and pear. Mint was a biggie with the colonists, you know,” Gabriel continued on, urbane as you please, ignoring the fact that Sam hadn’t looked at him yet.

“I’m guessing ‘apple mint’ is somehow different from regular mint?” Sam replied as sarcastically as he could, clacking the double barrel shut a little too forcefully. Although Gabriel could be a cruel, sarcastic pain in the ass, Sam never rebuffed conversation with him. How often do you get the chance to pick the brain of a creature billions of years old?

If Gabriel was bothered by the sarcasm, he didn’t say anything; he just kept taunting Sam.

“Sam Winchester! I’m shocked. You know your herbs and spices, from all those ceremonies and the like, what’s the dealio on not knowing this one?” Sam couldn’t help it. His eyes had flicked to Gabriel’s as soon as the angel said his full name. Something about that was exciting. Few people were lucky (or unlucky, as Dean would probably say) enough to address Sam in that tone. Familiarity was hard to come by in this business, and it really never failed to give Sam hope.

“Never come up before. Why? Anything in particular I should know?” Here though was where the conversation took an unexpected turn. The grin slid off Gabriel’s face as he observed Sam’s interest; he would even go as far as saying a rather calculating look entered the angel’s eye. Not that Sam cared, as Gabriel was probably always plotting and planning in that venus fly-trap mind of his.

“Not really. The colonists drank mint tea only because it wasn’t taxed. Bunch of cheap-skates, am I right?” Gabriel gave a wink, and Sam gave him his best 'I’m unimpressed with you’ look. The grin came back. Huh. Maybe there was something to this Apple Mint….

Gabriel went on to tell a wild story about the time he laced several British surveyors’ meals with wild chicory, sometime during the colonization of Australia. The men were convinced the natives they’d employed as cooks and laborers were doing it, and as a result beat them all the more severely. The natives then rose up and killed the men.

Despite the gore and slave-labor, it was pretty funny. At least the way Gabriel told it.

“Jeez, they definitely got what they deserved.” Sam said in spite of himself, still laughing a little at the description of the head surveyor’s penchant for snuff and refusal to wear a hat. Gabriel gave a smug smile.

“I just gave them a little reminder of what home tasted like. Literally,”

“Did you do that a lot? I mean, you didn’t sound pleased with the colonists here, even though they were overthrowing oppressors,” Sam asked. Gabriel clucked disapprovingly.

“I called them what they were. And they were cheapskates. It’s a little known fact, but America was built purely on the need for the expansion of capitalism. The soon-to-be middle class wanted their own little realm to play around in, without anybody to interfere,” the archangel drawled, drawing out the 'any’ for all it was worth. And suddenly, Sam didn’t give a crap about history, or what was right and wrong. Because Gabriel had refused to answer the question. Again. It made same a little vicious.

“Sounds like someone else I know,” he replied casually, getting up to place the rifle in the gun duffel. It had been the last one that needed cleaning. He heard a snort behind him, and the bed creaked. For a moment Sam thought the angel might walk over to him.

“Guilty as charged, Sam-bo. Ya got me. Slap on those cuffs and send me to the big house. I’m tired of my life of crime! Unless…” Sam looked over to see Gabriel sprawled on the bed, feet kicking back and forth. 

“You got a pair of cuffs for a different reason,” the archangel smiled lazily, and Sam knew the look on his own face was what Dean would call his 'bitch-face’.

“Well I’m glad you recognize that now. Am I finally gonna get that apology?” He skated over the last bit, choosing to ignore the fact that he was now imagining exactly how Gabriel would look in handcuffs.

“Oh come on, I know you had fun in TVLand! That was one of my greatest creations to date! It’s only competition would have to be all those U.F.O sightings back in the-”

“Yeah, I was throwing a barn-raising after the eightieth time you killed Dean, too,” _Barn raising?_ Sam avidly imagines putting his own head through a wall. The delightful mix of glee and disbelief on Gabriel’s face makes the imaginary wall brick.

“Don’t knock 'em until you’ve tried them, Sam! The things those crazy settlers could do with fermented radishes, mmm-mm!” Sam whirled around and stalked over to the bed. He loomed, hoping to high heaven it isn’t as suggestive as he thinks it is.

“Listen, I get that you’re an angel, an archangel, you have impunity, judgment, the wrath of god, all that. But now? You’ve quit heaven-permanently. It can’t hurt your ego to give one little 'I’m sorry’?” Sam tried for wheedling, but the words come out as frustrated.

“Well ya got one thing right, Sammy, I am an archangel. But the rest of that? Doesn’t sound to me like you actually want an apology,” a scowl is etched into Gabriel’s face, and made him look impossibly old, though his familiar fox-like features didn’t change a jot. The jump in logic left Sam drawing a blank.

“What?” Sam managed. Gabriel snorted and shook his head.

“In the immortal words of the Barenaked Ladies: get that together, and come back and see me," Gabe muttered. Sam's eyebrows shot up, and he knew his jaw was hanging in what was definitely an embarrassing and idiotic way.

“Here. Try it. You might like it.” Gabriel tossed him something which Sam caught automatically. A whoosh of feathers and a stiff, cold, anise scented breeze, the archangel was gone. Sam opened his palm to find a sucker, wrapped in delicate paper, the color of the sky just after the sun sets, with golden words scrawled over it. Sam thought they might be German, but that’s really, really not what’s important at the moment.

The door burst open, and Dean strode in, Castiel following, bringing his own distinct smell: pine and ozone. “Hey Sam! We got the book-whoa.”

Dean froze, however, when he saw the expression on Sam’s face.

“Did you just finish the seventh Harry Potter book again? I keep telling you man, it won’t get any easier, no matter how many times you read it. Like the end of 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’-”

“Gabriel was here,” Cas cuts across Dean’s monologue, carefully setting the huge stack of books he was carrying down at the spot where Sam had been cleaning the guns. He swept a glance over the room, eyes narrowed. Dean’s countenance darkened.

“What’s that ass-hat want now?” Dean groused. Sam gritted his teeth unconsciously at his brother's assumption.

“He didn’t want anything. We were talking, you know, about whatever, until…” Sam trails off because shit.

And here everyone thought Dean was the one out of touch with his emotional side. 

“I might have said something stupid?” Dean raised an eyebrow, but Sam could see the hint of worry in his eyes.

“Stupid as in, 'the wrath of an archangel will soon be brought down upon me, but more importantly upon my brother’? Or stupid as in 'open mouth, insert foot’?” Sam stared miserably out the window.

“Come on, Sam, which was it,” Dean used his 'older brother’ voice. Cas stared at him now too. Sam had never felt more stupid in his life.

“The second.” he managed to mutter. His brother and the angel relaxed, ever so slightly. Sam felt the stick of the sucker bite into his clenched hand.

Dean shook his head. “I’m really not a fan of how he’s in the habit of harassing Sam, Cas,” his older brother shot the angel a look. Like Cas was any more capable of stopping Gabriel from visiting than Sam or Dean was. Either way, Gabriel seemed hell-bent on talking to Sam anyways. The only time Dean really interacted with the archangel was on a hunt, and that was to bitch at him for making too much noise in the form of eating m&ms.

“You cannot really blame Gabriel. The time he spent in Purgatory wasn’t easy,” Castiel replied, looking reproachfully at the hunter. If Purgatory was anything like hell, then Sam could-

Hang on.

“He’s talked to you about it?” Both Cas and Dean looked at Sam in surprise.

“Why the hell would you care, Sammy?”

“Don’t call me that!” It came out before Sam could stop it, gut churning as the look of hurt flickered across his brother’s face. It disappeared so quickly, Sam thought he imagined he saw it. Yeah. Just like he imagined that brick wall he still wishes he could put his own head through.

“Wait, shit, wait, Dean, I didn’t, Gabriel just has me annoyed-”

“Ohhhh kaay, this is getting way too close to something like an emotional release for my tastes. Let’s just start reading, alright?” Dean turned and grabbed a few of the books and plopped himself down on the sofa, kicking his legs up on the coffee table. Cas just gives Sam a 'I have no earthly idea of what just happened’ look and does the same, sans feet on the coffee table.

Now Sam owes everyone an apology. Except for Bobby, thank god.

His cell phone rings.

Dammit.


	2. Chapter 2

Sam actually didn’t piss Bobby off. Miraculously. Granted, the old man was in such a bad mood when he called Sam, anything Sam said made no difference. Bobby was game for taking most monsters on, but apparently Leviathans were another thing altogether.

It hadn't helped the old man’s mood that he and Dean still let Cas travel and stay with them. Sam figured that even if Bobby wasn't personally offended by Cas' betrayal, he was full of righteous fury on Dean's behalf.

When Sam finally got off the phone with His Grumpiness, the Silence had already descended. It was the name he’d given the anxiety laden solitude that came into being whenever Dean and Cas were in a five foot radius. Recently, that is. Before, way before, Sam never got a word in edgewise. Now, the silence was deafening.

Not difficult to imagine how he got into the habit of talking to Gabriel. Civilly. Stupid Dean and his stupid lack of communication skills.

But realizing your emotions and failing to vocalize them beat not knowing the difference between your feelings and a hole in the ground and shooting your mouth off anyways. Because that always ended well.

In archangels giving you candy and leaving you the hell alone.

Yeah. Perfect.

As the evening wore on, and Dean’s end of the shitty coffee table became more and more crowded with beer bottles, Sam desperately held on to his shredded self-restraint. While his full-on hell flashbacks were now few and far between, the creeping sense of loneliness and bleakness never really left. When he was young he'd had a hard time sleeping with ambient noise, like a rusty pipe, or crappy refrigerator making noise. It was an itch that maybe lessened, but never fully went away. Everything was a little more on-edge.

He almost fell on his knees and praised a god he knew wasn’t there when Dean declared that he was ‘dead’ and promptly fell on a bed, fully clothed, breathing rapidly evening out and slowing. A guy can only take so much suffocation by things unsaid, Sam supposed.

He and Cas sat in unburdened silence, and Sam stared at Cas’s hands, for a time, as they carefully traced the words in the book, suddenly remembering how Gabriel’s hands had moved in a similar manner: painting pictures in the air to go along with his little tale about mayhem and violence and bitter pills to swallow.

“So, um, Cas,” Sam started, and Castiel looked up at him. Sam cleared his throat, pushing down the nervousness, before continuing.

“You said before that uh, Gabriel mentioned, or uh, talked to you. About Purgatory, I mean.” his eyes flicked uncertainly between the angel and Dean’s abandoned beer bottles. Cas’s face gently drifted into a frown.

“Yes. We’ve had a conversation or two on the subject. He was,” Cas trailed off and squinted, as if searching the middle distance for the right word.

“Curious, I suppose, as to how I felt after being 'god’. It was solicitous of him, I will say,” Castiel winced at the g-word, but finished what he was saying.

“Right, that was big of him, but you said he actually talked about Purgatory? I mean, how the hell did he end up there in the first place?” A few days after getting Cas back and making their escape to Bobby’s, and then to Rufus’s cabin, Gabriel had shown up, making Dean (even in his injured and drugged state) whip a knife across the room. The archangel had dodged it, no problem; Sam’s coat hadn’t been so lucky.

The angel had said, in some terse words, that he’d just gotten out of “FUCKING PURGATORY” so “A CERTAIN AIR-HEADED BROTHER OF MINE HAD BETTER START EXPLAINING”. Everything had rattled and shook, like a mini earthquake had struck their lonely little cabin. “RIGHT NOW.” Several windows broke, and Castiel had started to babble out the whole sorry tale. Dean sat white-faced and thin-lipped on the couch during the entire speech, never once saying a word.

They didn’t see Gabriel for another week.

The current Castiel, the one sitting on the couch across from Sam, looking thankfully less peaked and run-over, considered Sam’s question.

“I am sure you’re aware of this, but names are important, to beings, like us. It is important when you do spell-work, conjurations, vodou,” Cas’s eyes don’t leave Sam’s face, and now he can’t look away, and it’s like he’s being pulled into this vortex of you-know-he's-gonna-say-something-horrible-and-sad-but-you-can't-stop-listening.

“So when Gabriel exiled himself from heaven and took on the guise of the Trickster he purposely or inadvertently, I’m not exactly sure which, warped his fundamental nature. He was no longer Gabriel the Archangel, messenger of God. He became…” Cas trailed off again. Sam knew that look; the look of someone lost in memories. Not good or bad, just.

Memories.

“Became what?” Sam asked softly. Castiel refocused on him.

“Something else,” the angel said. Sam raises an eyebrow. Cas gives him a boxy little shrug in return. Somewhere in the vague, hazy depths of his memories, past his year being soulless (or near enough to it), past his time in the cage, buried deep in the memory of being consumed and surrounded by an intolerable brightness that whispered cruel things to him out of kindness, Sam remembers another version of Cas, but with the same jerky awkward rolling of the shoulders.

“Assbutt?” Cas jumped at the word and stared like Sam was about to come at him with a pitchfork.

“I just, got this really strong memory, all of a sudden. Sorry. It was a non-sequitur. So, when Gabriel died, he went to Purgatory. Because he was a monster, kind of,” Sam hurried on. He never liked to linger on those consumed-by-fire memories, scared that it would prompt a worse flashback. Castiel looked at him askance, as if thinking the same thing, but he nodded in agreement.

“Yes. I would presume he still had his wits about him when Dean opened the portal for-for a second time,” Cas faltered, now staring down at his hands. Sam isn’t exactly sure how to act around this new Cas, knowing he’d broken his wall, and the way he’d betrayed Dean. But who around here needed to sling around blame? He’d started the mother fucking apocalypse a scant three years ago.

That numerous people had tried to clean up after, including…Gabriel. What he and Cas had just been talking about finally hit Sam head on. Even though he’d forgiven himself and taken on the blame for almost destroying the world, he’d never paused to think about that particular casualty.

“Cas, Gabriel died,” Sam blurted. Cas’s head jerked up at the pronouncement.

“I’m sorry, should I be taking a cue from that-”

“No, I should be. Gabriel died. For us. For the whole planet. And we haven’t spoken a word of thanks. Not a single one. I was such an ass-oh my god-” For a moment Sam can’t move from the revelation of the sheer amount of douchiness he’d managed to produce in a single afternoon.

“Be fair to yourself Sam. You’ve been a bit busy,” Castiel remarked. Sam shook his head. This Winchester resistance to talking about things needed to end.

“That’s nice of you, Cas, but, we all seriously need to get our priorities straight. Like, right now," he asserted. The angel dipped his head in agreement.

“That is wise, Sam,” he replied, gaze drifted over to the sleeping lump of Dean. Dean hasn’t told Sam anything but the bare bones of his arguments with Cas, but he imagines there was much internal wailing and gnashing of teeth. Dean had already lost so many people, including, and probably most importantly Sam (he’s not trying to be self-involved, he just knows it’s the truth), and losing Cas was the final blow.

“You know, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Dean’s given up on you. He never did when you-when you went A.W.O.L. He just needs to know, I think, that you don’t want to give up either,” Cas stared at him, eyes roving Sam's face, a searching, almost hopeful look in his eyes.

“You haven’t given up, have you?” Sam continued; but it really wasn’t a question. The moment Sam had seen Dean struggling his way out of the reservoir, Cas clutching him like he was the last person in the world, Sam had known the angel and his brother were far from over.

"No. I struggled mightily over the last year, still questioning what it means to straddle heaven and earth. I still do not know the answer, but I believe mending Dean and I's relationship is the right choice," Castiel said quietly. Sam sighed, relieved to hear Cas say what he'd known all along. The two of them had left a lot unspoken, and now was the time to say it all.

“Might I ask, Sam, why you are so curious about Gabriel?” Cas inquired, hands folded neatly in his lap. Sam sucked in a breath. He could lie, and say he’d been thinking about Gabe being in purgatory from the lore and technical standpoint, and not own up to the creeping feeling that he was actually starting to _like_ the fucking asshole and was concerned for him. For what he’d sacrificed. But if Sam wanted to talk the talk, he had to walk the walk.

“He’s being, good, er, not-unhelpful, to us. It's been confusing the hell out of me, so I wanted to know maybe how he was feeling,” Sam said haltingly, kicking himself for sounding utterly like some teenager mumbling about a crush. Which, definitely wasn't the case. A slight smile appeared on Cas' face.

“It would appear that dying has rearranged Gabriel’s priorities. Given him a new outlook, if you will. Granted, he’s still very much like the angel he was before going to Purgatory, but. The difference is there,” and for the first time in the conversation, Castiel looked pleased. Not a mix of guilt and hope that colored his face when he looked at Dean, but actual satisfaction.

They sat there for a time, wrapped up in thoughts. Dean grunted quietly in his sleep and rolled over onto his back, all without waking up. Sam fingered the little piece of candy tucked into his pocket. He'd decided to save it because the wrapper was so beautiful. And maybe Gabe would tell him where he got it.

Maybe Sam can even ask the archangel if he'll take him there.


End file.
